GAMDIAS, a Taiwan based company is the talk in town. They are a newly established company producing gaming peripherals and they are coming up strong against existing brands in the market. How well are their products? We got the opportunity to test their Zeus GMS1100 Laser Gaming Mouse and Hermes Mechanical Keyboard. In this post, we shall review the Zeus GMS1100 Laser Gaming Mouse first.
Picking up the box for the first time, the packaging for the mouse is a sturdy box with a magnetic front flap opening for viewing purposes. After removing the top cover of the box, you will find the mouse is sitting nicely in a display case. The only problematic part is getting the mouse out of its seat. The mouse and cable are strapped down with plastic secure tags which you need to cut open and have the cables yanked out from slit openings on the base the mouse is sitting on. Present in the box besides the mouse are GAMDIAS stickers and a quick installation guide.
Picking up the mouse for the first time, it does not feel plasticky at all to the touch. The mouse comes attached with a 2 meter braided cable with a gold plated USB connector. You will find the design of the mouse pretty much interesting as it looks like its adorning an outer black armour. However, if you look closely at this “armour”, you will find that its actually three independently adjustable side panels for you to adjust according to your hand size and grip. All you need to do is turn the mouse over and you will see three metal wheels of which you can turn to expand or tighten the side panels. As I have small hands, I tighten up all the wheels to the smallest size, however for me the smallest is not quite small enough as the protruding rear of the mouse makes it difficult for me to fit my right hand perfectly on the shape of the mouse and fully utilise all buttons on the mouse.
There are 11 buttons present on the mouse whereby nine of them are programmable. Four buttons are located at the thumb rest, three buttons on the spine of the mouse and one button next to the left click of the mouse besides the default left, right and scroll buttons. An LED light at the bottom of the single button indicates which profile is activated for the mouse. By default, the first button on where the thumb lies is the forward function, followed by the backward function, volume up and volume down. The first button on the spine of the mouse increases the DPI of the mouse while the second button lowers the DPI. Clicking on the third button will launch the HERA application download page on your browser.
Turn the mouse over and you will find a silver hinge door that opens up by sliding the door downwards. This is where the additional weights for the mouse are stored. There are five slots and each weight weighs 4.5 grams. You can decide how heavy you want your mouse to be. However, you should bear in mind that weight will not be equally distributed after the add-on as the weights are located at the rear of the mouse and not the center of the mouse. It would take some time to get adjusted to a mouse with a heavier rear.
The mouse features a laser sensor of up to 8200 DPI, which is pretty much high enough for pixel perfect accuracy with only tiny movements of the mouse if you’re playing a game with high resolution. You can also select the polling rate of the Zeus from 125, 250, 500 and 1000Hz. Making this mouse’s heart beat is a 32-bit ARM Cortex premium micro-processor with 512kb built-in memory for your profiling need. On paper, GAMDIAS claims the Zeus owns 11 million click lifecycle. You will really need to push the limits to see when it stops responding to your clicks.
The GAMDIAS Zeus responded decently well during the testing phase which took a couple of weeks. Tasks include using it for work related purposes such as web browsing, photo editing, document, spreadsheet processing and of course playing games. The mouse performed well when using it for daily tasks. I tested it out with two game titles, namely Anomaly Warzone Earth Campaign and Batman Arkham City GOTY. While playing Anomaly, the DPI adjusting buttons are very much helpful in increasing the cursor’s movement from one point to the other while collecting and deploying ammo during gameplay. Playing Batman using this mouse proved to be a challenge for my small hands plus the thumb buttons were awkward for me to press. I believe the buttons would work well if my hand was slightly bigger. Nevertheless, I find the Zeus very well built as well as gliding around the screen with pin-point accuracy.
The mouse is only compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8. Plugging it into the Mac and the Mac detects it as a keyboard. Plus, the HERA software for GAMDIAS peripherals is not iOS friendly. I wish GAMDIAS would make a more minimalistic design for the HERA software in the near future, the partially transparent edges of the programme window as well as the multi-coloured graphics on the software is quite annoying to the gaze while completing the profile on the mouse.
